


The Prince and the Peacock

by ishie



Category: 30 Rock, Fairy Tales and Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 21:11:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/pseuds/ishie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once there was a Prince who wanted to marry a Princess. Only a real one would do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Prince and the Peacock

**Author's Note:**

  * For [winninghearts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/winninghearts/gifts).



> I hope you don't mind but I combined two of your prompts into one! I had such fun working on it, I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Many thanks to my beta and cheerleader, who shall be named at a later date, and so many apologies to Hans Christian Andersen, as well.

_Once there was a Prince who wanted to marry a Princess. Only a real one would do. So he traveled through all the world to find her, and everywhere things went wrong._

It wasn't as though Wesley still believed in fairy tales.

(Of course, he knew better than to say so aloud. No Snipes worth his salt would risk angering the sprites, after all. The life expectancy statistics for pasty unathletic men his age weren't pretty, even before anyone factored in enchantments and resentful supernatural creatures. He'd drawn up the actuarial tables!)

But when he awoke from his enchanted slumber, over and over again, to find that the princess he'd been reluctantly courting was actually an evil witch in disguise... Well. That was certainly not Jiminy!

-

"I simply don't care whether you're happy or not. You've been living there for nearly ten years! When are you going to choose a bride and come home?"

Wesley shuddered. As if the thought of the dreary, uncontrollable riffraff of London weren't enough, somehow even the thousands of miles of open ocean between them wasn't enough to dull his mother's strident tones. He'd hoped, once upon a time, that the distance would have some sort of dimming effect on the magical mirrors but no such luck. Every single call made it sound as if she were standing in the very next room, ratcheting up to the "duty and honor" speech that had replaced nearly all other normal conversation since his father died.

If he told her he actually _had_ chosen his bride, or had her chosen for him, with whatever black magic it was that kept bringing them together, against all odds and sanity and, and, vows of temperance... Wesley was a lot of things, but willing to confess all to his mother? Not to mention the fact that that his intended kept turning him down once the alcohol or her depression wore off? He most emphatically was not.

"Mother, I don't have time for this today." He dropped to his knees and peered under the chesterfield. Everyday slippers were fine for the informal portions of Cerie and Aris's divorce ceremonies, but he'd never be able to show his face in public again if he didn't fancy it up for the gala. There was only so far family would look the other way.

"Do you have a princess there with you now? Who is she?!" She leaned into the mirror, trying to peer around the gilded frame. Her fairy-spun crown tilted dangerously low over one arched eyebrow. "It's not that oily-skinned badger-faced one again, is it?"

Wesley hung his head for an instant. "I'll be late for the rehearsal dinner if I don't leave now. It's nearly a forty minute ride by velocipede."

"Velocipede? For heaven's sake, Wesley, you're heir to the Snipes kingdom and all that it entails! Why can't you use transteleportation dust like a _normal_ person?"

"Goodbye, Mother!"

-

Cerie and Aris's divorce would also mark their seven-month-iversary as a wedded couple. Practically a record for mixed marriages in this day and age, truth be told.

That was the real trouble with trying to find fresh blood to introduce into the royal houses: no one was in it for the long haul anymore. It used to be that when a prince took a bride from the mortal realm, the girl was so dazzled — by magic and starlight and whatever other fripperies one could conjure up, not to mention the wealth, power, and privilege — that the thought of leaving never crossed her mind. Well, rarely.

Take Wesley's grandparents, for instance. From the moment Maria Walthamstonshirington was presented at court as Hunton Snipes' affianced bride, she threw herself into the kingdom's affairs so thoroughly that it took seven years _after_ her death to get her to stop presiding over the dowager's manor court.

Of course, it might have gone better if Cerie had been the mortal in this case. Aris... Well, he just wasn't cut out for the life.

As Wesley locked the chain on his footcycle, a gargantuan stretch Humvee disgorged the divorce party. Cerie and her mother swept up the steps into the hotel in a flurry of shopping bags and pastel Uggs. Aris, on seeing the vehicle start the laborious process of merging back into traffic, took a few steps after it, hurling obscenities in its wake.

Cerie was watching him from just inside the hotel's glass doors. "Can you believe I ever found that adorable?"

Wesley mumbled something agreeable. If there was one rule he lived by, it was never to contradict his cousin. He was but a guest on her shores. One cross word from her would banish him back to England faster than he could stutter an apology.

"Anyway! I have _just_ the girl for you!" She took his arm, all sweetness and light again. "She's already in the banquet room, but you'll have _plenty_ of time to get to know her better. You're going to be divorce buddies all weekend!"

"Ouch," Wesley complained through gritted teeth. "You're holding on a bit tight there, cousin."

She trilled a fake laugh and tossed her hair back. "Just because I've given up on love for the month doesn't mean everyone should, Wes."

Wesley gritted his teeth harder at the loathsome nickname.

"Now, just smile and make nice and you'll be whisking your bride back to meet your mother in no time!"

She shoved him through the double doors to the banquet hall, where twelve silk-covered tables waited for the illustrious guests. A man in what passed for livery in America was setting up one of those hideous rolling bars in one corner. Against the opposite wall, several cocktail tables were overflowing with sumptous hors d'oeuvres, including a shrimp cocktail fountain and an iced latte sculpture.

"Have fun, you guys!" Cerie sang. She pushed Wesley forward again and shut the doors, as a moderately fit woman in a far-too-tight bubblegum pink sheath turned away from the shrimp cocktail fountain, a huge plate in one hand and a dash of mustard at the corner of her mouth.

This was Cerie's idea of his future queen? This... this... _harpy_? Was the family curse finally taking hold, turning her brain to brie? Had she forgotten all the times this had ended in disaster in the last year?

She was making him divorce buddies for an entire weekend with _Liz Lemon_?

"You have got to be kidding me," they both spat.

-

"Look," Liz said, after washing down a handful of jumbo tiger shrimp with almost a full glass of champagne, "I'm only here because that infant guilted me into being her bridesmaid in the first place. Who ever heard of bridesmaiding as a lifelong commitment?"

"Who hasn't?" Wesley countered. "Bridesmaiding is..."

"Not even a word?"

"You used it first!"

Liz grunted and polished off the champagne.

-

The night passed excruciatingly slowly. After the appetizers came the champagne toast by the best man, whose public speaking skills were rivaled only by Aris' mostly inarticulate hoots from the divorce party's head table.

After the champagne toast was the whisky toast, by the mother of the bride in place of her matron of honor, who was busy annulling her own hasty nuptials in Las Vegas.

After the whisky toast was the soup course, during which the bride broke down in sobs as her soon-to-be ex-groom hit on her mother.

"Oh, brother," Liz muttered. She flagged down the nearest waiter and asked him to bring the whole bottle. Any bottle. Whatever was the closest and the fullest.

"And the most expensive," she added.

Wesley told him to make it a double.

-

"It's not like I was asking all that much, you know?" Liz's words were starting to slur together, but Wesley's whole brain was, too.

"I know," he said, doing his best to offer consolation. "You just want to be happy! There's nothing wrong with wanting to be happy. The whole world wants to be happy. I want to be happy!"

Liz stared deep into his eyes. Hers were ringed with smudged mascara. Rimmed with red from her earlier crying jag when the hotel bar refused to send someone out to get her a double sausage hoagie.

"Do you?" she asked, a hesitant grin lightening the badgery look around her mouth. "Do you really want to be happy?"

He took a bracing sip of double-malt scotch and clutched her hand. "I do. And you, Liz, do you want to be happy?"

"I do, Wesley. More than anything!"

They embraced, right there in the hotel lobby. On the plush velvet sofas where they had been banished after threatening the bartender's life.

Wesley felt as though he could float right up into the heavens, lifted aloft by nothing more than alcohol fumes and the press of Liz's narrow, spinsterish lips against his own.

When they were pulled apart so they could be escorted to their rooms and stop "scaring the other guests," whatever _that_ meant, the unromantic sods, all of which he was very happy to bring up to their superiors in complaint, Wesley thought he heard an approving snort from the mirror over the roaring fireplace.

-

"Is this bed made of _rocks_? _Ugh_ ," was the cheery pronouncement that welcomed Wesley to the new day. An icy foot lodged itself in the small of his back, then was snatched away quickly. Seconds later, it returned, this time with its mate, both of which took up residence somewhere in the vicinity of his kidney.

"Please don't be Liz Lemon," he muttered into his pillow.

"I heard that," the she-devil spat. She adjusted her feet yet again, this time burrowing her icy flesh in under his side and kicking slightly. "You know, at some point we're going to have to either face the fact that we're both raging alcoholics with mental problems, or..."

"Or you could just marry me and we could be reliably miserable for the rest of our lives, instead of intermittently hopeful? You have to admit, a steady diet of disappointment would be a lot more stable than whatever it is we're currently doing."

"I really hate it when you make sense this early in the morning," she grumbled. "And you're freezing my feet off. And, _seriously_ , what is in this bed? Are we sleeping in a quarry?"

Wesley was glad his back was turned toward her, and for the pillows covering his head. If she saw his smile, she'd be off and running on one of her frequent, tiresome lectures about taking her seriously as a person, especially when she was sex-naked, or just-showered-naked, or even actual-naked.

-

"Well?" the bitter-faced old queen asked, her accent as frosty as her highlights. "How did you sleep last night, Miss Lemon? I had our best rooms made up for you, with the softest mattresses and linens in all the kingdom."

Under the table, Wesley dug his fingernails into his leg. It didn't matter one bit what he wanted in a bride, in the end. No matter who he chose, no matter who he settled for, it all came down to whether the family found her acceptable, or wanting. He gave Liz the pained grimace she was so used to seeing directed at her in place of a smile.

She returned it with a dirty look, and pointed her knife at the queen. Bits of sausage flew out of her mouth when she began to speak.

"For one thing, Your Majesty, what is _with_ you people and your beds? If I wanted to sleep on gravel, I'd go lie down in the driveway. On top of which, I might as well have. It's freezing in this place! Haven't you ever heard of central heating? I know a guy, Crazy Larry. You give him a call, and slip him a hundred bucks, and he'll get you fixed right up. Six, seven months to clean out a radiator, tops. Guaranteed."

As she went on, complaining about every little thing that had crossed her path between their arrival at Heathrow's transteleportation terminal to the full breakfast on her plate, Wesley nearly sank to the floor, so great was his relief. He tried to take Liz's hand in his, but she stabbed at him with a fork when he got too close to her toast.

At the head of the table, his bitter-faced mother smiled, her fairy-spun crown tilting dangerously low.

 _Nobody but a real princess could be as sensitive as that._


End file.
